Escape Points (8 page)

I would pitch in with his children and his work, listen, host dinner parties, plan anniversaries, spend time with his mother. Yes, yes. I would be Beyoncé hot when I could. But I would not be reprimanded for caring too much about my own children and caring too much about work. I care so much because I am the only one caring.

I can never stop being a mother of three sons, because that is who I am. I can put my cell phone on silent while we slow dance in the den, but I cannot turn it off. Not on the anniversary of our first date, and especially not on New Year’s Eve. Because New Year’s Eve could produce the apocalypse for teenage sons. I can take a long weekend, but I need to go home Sunday night because I have to throw in a load of laundry and drive someone to school from my own home the next morning. I do not want someone who is waiting for my ambition to subside and my children to get away from me. It is not that I do not know how to relax but that I never want to be great at relaxing. I have things to do.

In my case, I was the only one for my sons to call. There was no other parent. I always figured the boys would eventually move out of the house. I also figured I was worth the wait.

So for the last few years, since the end of that solid relationship, I have dated scores of men. Again, first dates mostly. Perhaps only
three or four of these men did I go out with a second or third time, no one I trusted with my heart, goodness, even my home address. A friend recently said it is like the movie
50 Dresses
, except it is not all that funny.

The things I want to hear—and feel in my marrow—are not that I am irresistible in that light, but that I am understood. I need to be soothed with the notion that it will all be all right, all of it, not just tonight or this week. I want him to say that he knows I am afraid and not that he will rescue me, but that he will have my back, even if it only means he will answer his cell phone when I call as I am driving alone late at night and maybe get a flat tire. He does not have to solve my problems, but I want him to know I have them. I need him to understand you cannot say “forever” to a single mother a thousand times for years and years and hope she does not remember the promise.

I understand that some may say I am overzealous about my children, that I am distracted with all my work. But here is the bottom line: I do all of this because one of their parents left them on purpose. And that fact sears through me like a splash of acid. I know that in raising alone three boy-men, I get all the blame for everything they do or don’t. I also know in my heart I get most of the credit. But I do what I do for them because it is what I need to do. It is just me holding the ball, me in the waiting room.

And I acknowledge it is a lot to ask. It will be until my youngest son graduates from college and moves out on his own, before I can spend more time with someone—for sleepovers, long weekends, and spontaneous trips to see the leaves change or the snow fall. But it really is only a few more years. And I will do what he needs and wants me to do to build something together that works for both of us.

Most men can’t stand in line for five minutes for the perfect cup of coffee or wait patiently for a traffic light to move from red to green, much less come in third place after children and work. What I know is that at the end of my marriage almost two decades ago, I officially retired the notion of love as transformational tool, trying to get someone to do something or be what he is not. And I do not
expect someone to change me. This is who I am. And I hope for someone I will love thoroughly and authentically who will believe that is enough. And he will love me for who I am in all my flawed imperfection.

It takes a long time to shape a human. It takes a very long time to shape three good men. And it takes more energy, focus, and commitment than I ever could explain to someone who does not want to hear, that this is the most important thing I will ever do. And it must be done. This is not elective. This is not a choice. And it can be done.

It takes help from family and friends and coaches who arrive in a high school wrestling room out of nowhere to be someone your sons will respect, love, and listen to. But you can’t be drinking wine on somebody’s porch when a son is in crisis. And you can’t be whispering sweet nothings when a son is stranded and needs a ride home. Children can forgive many things—the hurts, the failures, the mistakes. But they cannot forgive you forgetting that they come first.

Buttons. That’s what came to mind when I thought of having a partner, of being in love. In my mind’s eye, I could see a huge drawer of spare buttons, some in the small plastic envelopes you get pinned to the sleeve of the slightly more expensive clothes, others just tossed in with excruciating randomness. I have a box of them at home in my sewing kit, hundreds of mismatched buttons: the gold military buttons and the flat pearlized ones in shell or tawny colors for blazers and jackets, the ones made of braided fabric, the small printed ones belonging to blouses or dresses I no longer own. All you want is two buttons that can hold together a piece of fabric for a good long time. You can spend a lifetime looking for another button similar to yours, simply trying to make somewhat of a match, just two together that appear to make a pair. You can expect symmetry—you can hope for it, pray for it, try to make two buttons work together—but no two ever match exactly, now do they?

T
he screen message on my cell phone read U
NKNOWN
. I always answered anyway, no matter who it was, what time of day, or whether it was convenient: it could be an emergency for the boys. I once got a call when Colin suffered a concussion in seventh-grade gym class. Another time, I got a call when Brendan, in fourth grade at the time, landed on his knee on the playground and a wood chip daggered in so deeply it had to be removed in the emergency room. Weldon had the stomach flu one morning in middle school and needed to come home immediately. I answered that call too. I have turned around forty-five minutes into the hour-plus drive to work to retrieve a son, fix something, start over.

So I answered.

“Hello, Michele.”

I had not heard my former husband’s voice in about a year. His voice sounded as methodical and rehearsed as if it was delivered in a slow, intravenous drip. He said he was in town and wanted to talk to the boys and set up a time to see them. It was 2006, more than a
year since he had seen them, more than two years since he moved to the Netherlands. I couldn’t remember the last time he spoke to any of them.

“Call them yourself. They can arrange this for themselves,” I told him. “They have the same e-mail they had before, the same cell phone numbers. We have the same home number.”

We had a cordial conversation—brief and nonconfrontational. There was no point in confronting him. Attempting to redirect any of his behavior was like trying to sort through a tangle of live wires with wet hands. I hung up, slowed down the car, turned right off of Dempster Street at the next side street, pulled over to the curb, got out, and threw up. I stood in the street near a pile of leaves and breathed deeply until the nausea passed and I could get back in the car.

Later that night I told the boys at dinner. “Your dad called today to see when he could see you.” I skipped the throwing up near the curb part.

Each son responded with a flurry of angry remarks.

When he entered their lives without preparation or warning, I felt as if we were all thrown into a Gopher Hunt arcade game at those manic kids’ entertainment places like Chuck E. Cheese’s. Plastic gophers pop up from holes on a flat board and the goal is to smack the gopher down with a rubber mallet; that’s how the player earns points. Then another gopher and another pop up, over and over again, in different places each second without pattern or logic, until your time runs out and you put more tokens into the machine or walk away. And then? Nothing. As if the game was unplugged.

Two days later my former husband sent me an e-mail with the header D
AD
I
S IN
T
OWN
. The e-mail came as a surprise, like the phone call. In it he said he hoped the boys would call him on his cell phone. He also asked if he could have a private face-to-face conversation with me that would take fifteen minutes. He said he had an idea that talking to me would be “the first order of business in terms of reconnecting with the boys.” And he signed it, “Love, Matthew.”

His name was not Matthew. He changed it after he moved to Europe. Not legally, I gathered, since legal correspondence concerning him still listed his given name. Debt collectors called the house regularly asking for him by the name I knew.

The boys did not call him back. I would not meet him; I had learned from years of encounters with him that there was the lure, a promise of something, and then I surrendered my resistance, agreed to a meeting, and the trap snapped shut. He sprung on me a new hurt, a new demand, a new denial.

“Any ideas you have for me you can send in writing to me or my attorney,” I told him in an e-mail.

My attorney had been trying to arrange a deposition with him for more than a year, and my former husband delayed the requests each time. He had filed a motion to stop all child support past, present, and future and would not show up for any deposition or court appearances. In the meantime, he paid nothing at all. For years. A deadbeat dad. Like in the movies. Like in the news stories.

Two more days passed and he sent another e-mail. He explained in the first few sentences that he would be busy celebrating the birthdays of his children from his second marriage, his daughter and her son. He did not mention that his son Weldon’s birthday was also that same week.

In this e-mail he proposed that he and I write a book together on the “important message” of forgiveness, and said that he had already gathered his thoughts on the book. He went on to outline three “process premises”: that our lives always reflect what we intend, that no one has ever treated us badly or wronged us, that every decision we make is the perfect decision at the time. He then elaborated with sixteen subpremises. He acknowledged that sometimes other people’s decisions cause us pain, but it does not mean the decisions were not “excellent.”

I was livid. Is genocide self-induced? Where does this put ethnic cleansing, violence, and abuse? A drive-by shooting, drownings? Were they all excellent decisions at the time, with no victim or perpetrator, just a reflection of what we truly want? Is everyone off the
hook? Are you? Was being a father a part-time job you just quit? This psychobabble made me furious.

Of course, I would never tell the boys that his decision to have nothing to do with them emotionally, physically, or financially was an excellent decision. Never. No blame, no responsibility. No father should ever say that. No father should ever do what he did. I found the behavior reprehensible and immoral.

“I am busy with my own work, I will not write a book with you,” I told him on the phone.

A few days later I picked up the package he sent to my post office box—a large document envelope with a photocopy of every card and love letter I sent him in our twelve-year relationship. I opened it and read them all. Some of them I distinctly remember writing and why—the birthdays, the anniversaries, the congratulations on this, the condolences on that. I suppose he intended for it all to soften me; the note he included said I once felt differently about him and here was the proof.

Yes, but he was a different person then. I didn’t know he would disappear. I didn’t know who he would become.

“Your father leaving has nothing to do with you,” I said to the boys so often it made them mad. I wanted to be sure I said it, even if in some back room of their minds they did not believe it.

I no longer was angry at him for anything he did to me; that had dissipated years ago. I had worked hard to let it go. But our children are not adults. There is no mutual blame. These boys are your children. And you are the father. Every time I saw how the boys reacted to his omissions or his hurtful actions, every time they were reminded of his abandonment by his own sudden eruptions, I was infuriated for what he did to them anew. The fresh harm.

A good friend said his sudden departure to Europe gave the boys all the hurt of a parent’s death with none of the insurance benefits. I was familiar with the insurance benefits.

“Do you have any other insurance? This has been canceled,” the receptionist in the pediatrician’s office said somewhat cheerfully when
I signed the boys in. I had three back-to-school physicals booked for the boys. They were eleven, nine, and six years old.

The receptionist called the insurance company again and handed me the phone. “This was canceled months ago by the policyholder,” she told me.

My mouth went dry. The boys had been walking around—and wrestling—uninsured, even though the divorce decree included the stipulation that he carried the boys on his insurance. In the car on the way home, I called my brother Paul, and the next day he arranged to get the boys insurance before I could add them to mine. There was little at this point that my former husband could have done to reclaim the trust I had in him as a father. On a very basic level I did not trust he had their best interests at heart.

“
D
r. Werber saw your mammogram and wants you to come back as soon as you can for another look,” her assistant said on the phone. I was in my office on campus and made an appointment for the following day, Friday.

You should know your life will change when the doctor calls you back in for a second, third, and fourth look. I had been going to Dr. Joan Werber for almost ten years for annual mammograms. Every year I was afraid to go, and every year they found nothing, the results were normal, I was fine.

Minutes after the return visit for the second ultrasound, I was in Dr. Werber’s office. She shut the door.

“This is not good,” she said, pointing to the X-rays and the ultrasound image she had tacked next to it. I had to push down the tears, swallow the suffocating fear. “We have to find out what this is.”

She explained what would happen next. She was kind. She wrote her home phone and cell phone numbers on a card, then asked me what hospital I wanted to go to for the core biopsy. She got me
in Monday morning with Dr. Kambiz Dowlat at Rush University Medical Center. The day before Halloween.

I couldn’t shake the thought of how bad it would be for the boys if I died. It was too Dickensian. Their father runs away and has nothing to do with them. Their mother gets cancer. My boys should not be abandoned again.

Who would know them the way I do? Who would know they love the custard filling with fresh strawberries in their birthday cakes, the egg lemon soup from the Greek restaurant on 22nd Street? How they like drinking milk straight from the plastic jug and roast chicken stuffed with oranges.

I never should have grounded them; that would be all they remembered. Did I make their lives sing? I know I yelled too much. Sometimes I was mean. They did not understand me. So often I did not understand them fully. Did they know I loved them more than anything or anyone in the world? Was my part alone good enough to make up for the absence of their father? How would they be, who would they be, without either parent?

“I don’t have time to die,” I told my sister Madeleine when I called her.

“No, you don’t. And I’ll bring dinner. You don’t have time to make that either.”

I said nothing about my possible diagnosis to the boys over the weekend. Weldon was working on his early admissions application to one of the dozen colleges he was applying to for the following fall; it was due in a few days. He had to concentrate. I had to edit his final draft, and I knew he would be too worried or distracted if I told him or the other boys about the mammogram.

My doctor called me on my cell phone to see how I was. I was getting calls from my sisters and my brother Paul all weekend. I kept walking outside to talk, and saying everything was fine if the boys asked.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” Weldon asked a dozen times from Friday to Sunday. “Why are you acting so weird?”

I was preoccupied, nervous, distant. I told him I was worried about work, making my book deadline, reworking the undergraduate
curriculum for winter and spring, and a few upcoming speeches. I said I had a lot on my mind. I hated lying to him, but I knew he would worry if I didn’t. Let him get the essay done; that was important. He asked me what seemed like every few hours.

I had to lie.

“Only you would have surgery at Bloomingdale’s,” Madeleine said.

Dr. Dowlat’s office and the surgical center were in 900 N. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the same building as the department store, as well as dozens of other upscale shops. The waiting area at his office was like the new South Loop restaurants with the single-syllable names—the adjectives like Red or East, where the waiters chatted in sweet tones and told you about the chanterelle mushrooms and the roux with leeks and garlic. Against the window were brown leather chairs and couches, burnt-orange textured pillows, large vases and sculptures. Smooth jazz played in the background. In the examination room, Dr. Dowlat calmly washed his hands. His face was oval with olive skin and thick black brows. His manner was regal, princely, and he asked me to lie down and pull down the top of the cotton gown. I was embarrassed, not anxious, to be bare-breasted in front of the doctor I’d just met.

The core biopsy procedure took a few minutes. It involved an extremely long needle and was only slightly painful, since he injected anesthesia into the area. I was eager to pull the gown back up. After I did, I dared to ask.

“In your experience, do you think this is cancer?” I was trying to sound nonchalant, as if it was just a small question, one he could answer off the cuff. I was a journalist after all; I was never one who could wait patiently for a test result or the answer to any question. I could take it, I needed to know.

“Yes, it is likely it is cancer,” he said crisply.

The words hit like a fireball. In the same instant, both of his arms were outstretched, a father’s instinct, and he hugged me briefly.

“I thought it was better to tell you than to have you wait,” he said. “I thought you would want to know.”

He told me what would happen next. I tried to take it all in but couldn’t remember where I laid down my purse.

I did not feel the anger of
Why me?
Rather I felt,
Why not me?
I had seen a number of friends go through worse, from the death of a spouse to the death of a child. Years earlier when my brother Paul called to tell me his wife, Bernie, died in her sleep in their house in Florida, he sounded as if he was on helium.

“Bernie died,” he said.

“What?”

And I had made him say it again.

Bernie had an undiagnosed brain tumor, and her death in 2003 left Paul and their three children steamrolled by grief. The next year, my sister Maureen’s ex-husband died of a heart attack in his car. My friend, Norma, lost her only son, Ian, when he had a seizure at his high school, hours after she dropped him off with his backpack and a kiss. Both of my parents were dead. My brother Bill’s wife, Madonna, was struggling with ovarian cancer.

People died. People who are not supposed to die, died. Just like that, driving to dinner, sleeping in bed, walking down the hall. Everyone died, but sometimes you had no warning and it made no sense. Not everyone was old. Not everyone expected it right then. Not everyone was prepared.

I have cancer.

“You get cancer from wearing deodorant,” someone told me.

“I am glad for every sweaty day in the last thirty-five years that I wore deodorant,” I told her.

You didn’t know why you got cancer. Unless you were chain-smoking in an asbestos-battered building, eating chips of lead paint, and wearing moth balls around your neck, your guess was as good as anybody’s. It was a complicated formula of genetics plus environment plus stress plus fate plus who knows what, maybe the perfume my mother wore when she was pregnant or the weed killer my father spread on the backyard lawn. It was the diet soda I drank. The milk I didn’t. It wasn’t the blueberries I ate or the red peppers I loved.

Cancer was everywhere. Everybody walked around with those pink ribbons on their lapels and the magnetized rubber versions on their cars. The good news was most of the time you got the breast cancer removed and you were fine. You couldn’t start micromanaging and dissecting your history to single out every bit of everything you ingested or didn’t ingest, because the figuring out would make you crazy. At first I couldn’t even read the cancer websites. There were too many unhappy endings. Too many stories. Too much grief. Too many hypotheses. Too many women died.

Get it out of your body expeditiously, do what they say, have the treatments, take the drugs, and you’ll be fine. You don’t have to die. I couldn’t die. The boys would have no one. I couldn’t die now.

I went home and tried to act like nothing was wrong, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I’m not proud of the way I told the boys the next day. The best explanation was that I was so exhausted from worrying that I cracked wide open like a barrel of red paintballs thrown against a white garage.

Halloween morning about 7:30
AM,
I was taking Brendan and Weldon to their high school before going into work. I had known for sure for one day that I had cancer; it had been more than a week since it was suspected. I had said nothing to the boys about the diagnosis, acting as hard as I could as if nothing was the matter while inside I was a volcano of fear.

Brendan couldn’t find his backpack and was throwing a fit.

“Mo-oo-om! Where did you put my backpack? I need my backpack! Mom!”

“Look in your room. Look under your bed. Look in the trunk of the car.” I tried to breathe.

He kept shouting, swearing. It was several minutes before he found it. We got in the car and before I pulled out of the driveway, with Brendan still shouting, I did the unthinkable.

“Stop it! I have cancer!” I screamed.

“What did you say?” Weldon asked.

Then I started crying. And jabbering. “I found out yesterday, but I knew it could be a possibility,” I wept. “You were right, something was wrong,” I told Weldon.

As if by telling him I was validating his instincts and everything would be OK, he would be sympathetic now. As if I had not just scared the hell out of him.

The boys were quiet. I pulled out of the driveway and kept driving. I didn’t have time to explain what was happening properly, and I am sure I would have if Brendan hadn’t been so upset and if I’d had more sleep. I broke in a million pieces before their eyes. I told my friend Susy later that morning on the phone; she was my touchstone. Not only did Susy have two teenage boys, but she also had been the editor of a parenting magazine. Susy always had good advice on everything from sons to work to salads.

After a long pause, she said, “OK, so it’s a Bad Mommy Moment. You get a few a lifetime.”

What she didn’t say was, optimally, you never had any.

“So then what? Did you drop them off and say, ‘Have a nice day?’”

Pretty much.

On the bright side, this was not how I told Colin later that day. For him, I was saner. In the best of worlds, I wouldn’t have screamed the news at the older two boys on the way to school. Like a lunatic, I made real all their fears about having no parents. I told Colin in a calm voice. You could say I was upbeat. Colin took the news well and I reassured him that I would be fine.

“My mom has cancer,” Colin told Anne, Mike’s mom, like he was saying I had brown eyes or a new pair of boots. Colin had gone to Mike’s house in the next block to trick or treat. Anne called me as soon as the boys left.

“It’s true,” I told her.

“He seems OK with it,” she said.

I hoped the other two would forgive me.

The surgery to remove the cancer in a simple lumpectomy was scheduled for the next week. All three of my sisters came at 6
AM
to pick me up.

“I’ll be fine,” I said to the boys. “Go to school. You can call my cell at lunch. I’ll be home when you come home from practice.” The sitter would be there to make sure everything went on schedule.

I knew they would be watching me, and no matter what I felt like, I had to be positive, like this wasn’t scary. Like I was not terrified that I was going to die and leave them alone.

Mothers die. Good mothers die.

A few minutes after I awoke in the recovery room following the surgery, Dr. Dowlat appeared. “You don’t have cancer anymore. It’s gone.”

I liked that about him. Pragmatic, straightforward. I did not want to live my life counting down the days before it came back. Defining myself as a survivor one year out, two years out, three years out, every anniversary feeling terrified. I didn’t want to think about cancer every time someone called to ask how I was. I told myself it was like having a flat tire. I got the tire fixed and was driving on, hitting the highway, moving ahead. I was done with having cancer. It was gone. I’d had a one-millimeter cancerous mass in my left breast, clean margins, no nodes involved. But it was the bad kind of cancer—as if there was a good kind—invasive.

“Let’s plan something,” I said to my sisters. My chest ached. I was so thirsty.

“Want to plan out a new kitchen?” Madeleine asked.

“That will make me depressed. I couldn’t afford it.”

We decided to plan a fiftieth birthday party for our brother Paul at the end of November. We picked a large Italian restaurant that could accommodate a crowd. Then we planned the menu for Christmas Eve, our family’s traditional celebration, with gift exchanges between cousins, thirty-five of us in all. Maureen made a list of the twenty-one cousins to swap gifts. Every year I always asked to buy for girls; there were fourteen girls and seven boys in the cluster of nieces and nephews. I wanted a chance to buy something feminine and girlish, a reason to go to H&M, even if I did shop there for me and I was usually the oldest person in the store by three decades. I took the prescriptions for pain and infection, and we all went to the restaurant on the sixth floor of Bloomingdale’s. It would be OK. I had plans.